Meaning a light man like this man letting butterfly flapping his wing. They've down in a forest.
Man, it gonna cause the tree fall, letting five thousand miles away.
Many nobody seen it. Nobody else. You might seem like you don't need to know, man Big, like you followed him another story and you got back in fact that that's don't win. Man got back and dag on panel. Man, Now you don't don't matter.
Man, all right, So we're finally back normal monologue schedule. We'll continue on, but the foreseeable future back from travel hopefully won't happen again. So today's episode is with John Carter, a great substacker, one of the elite few for whom
I read religiously. And he did a great article about the boomers, about a clip from Kevin O'Leary, at least in my mind, the guy from Shark Tank talking about people making seventy k a year wasting their money on twenty eight dollars lunches, the idea, of course, being that if you take that money, if you invested into an index fund, you'd have enough money for a down payment on a house. Now, look, I realize it. It is cheaper to pack lunches at home. But the sentiment really
ticked people off. Felt like, hey, man, look, you're worth a couple billion dollars. Why are you telling me you know how to make it right? It seems out of touch when housing prices are exploding at the same time as wages are stagnant. Oh and also food is more expensive than it's ever been. It rubs people the wrong way. They get really mad, and understandably so. Carter makes the point, I think quite insightfully that this is sort of the
marshmallow test gone. For those who aren't familiar, it's a classic experiment where you give a kid a marshmallow, you put it on the table, and you say, if you can wait five minutes, I'll give you two. Of course, this is checking a kid's time preference. Are they able to defer a win now for a bigger win later? Are they able to defer their enjoyment? And what the authors of this study found is that you can track
those kids over time and they're much more successful. You know, the kid who's likely to do that is likely to out earn his counterpart with low impulse control. And it makes sense now what Carter said What he wrote, and I thought this was particularly interesting, is that this experiment has been broken. The idea coming from boomers is that you're the kid who couldn't wait. You're too stupid, You
just didn't have enough self control. You didn't offer the marshmallow a firm handshake, you didn't pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Simply was a failure of character. And while certain I think we can all think of people who do manage their money poorly, that doesn't account for the scope of the breakdown we're seeing. Seems as if, at a very basic level, something is wrong, well past the ability of people to make good decisions. There's an additional
layer to this. You don't need me to tell you this, You've no doubt seen it.
I know.
I've said before that in my social circle almost everyone is downwardly mobile. Almost everyone is doing worse than their parents or their grandparents. And so, yeah, we feel that we see that. And the argument that John Carter made is, well, that isn't the way the experiment was set up. What actually happened is that the kid who waited, oh, he didn't get anything at all. The rules were broken. He was promised if you do this, you will reap a reward.
And he didn't get anything. Look at education, he went to school, you got the good degree, you kept your debt down, and now what you're a professional podcaster in my case at least, or you're working at a restaurant. You're working two or three jobs which all combined seem to take you a lot of time and don't actually get you out of the consumption trap. You can never push through into actually saving You're keeping your head above
water maybe, but if then not by much. And the idea that in that situation where you followed the advice, you did what Dave Ramsey told you to and it's not working, that you are simply an idiot for not being born in nineteen fifty three. Well, it rubs people the wrong way. It's sort of insulting. It sort of brings out this sort of murderous rage that I think we've all seen all too many times, especially because you
look at how our elders got to their position. You know, they had the advantage of an immense amount of cultural capital. They acquired assets before explosive inflation and were able to rise that value up throughout their entire life. But now on the back end, they're turning around and saying, well, I did it, so can you. You just need a push harder, You just need to work more. Failing to appreciate the advantages they had and the disadvantages their children
or grandchildren do as well. It's a profound inversion, and it's particularly frustrating from the conservative world, whether religious or political leaders, because they will defer to these sort of aphorisms, these sort of harmless sayings we've all heard a hundred times. I've mocked them already. But then they will say, well, why are you so angry? There's something wrong with you for objecting to this situation. You are a virile and
anti semi living in your mother's basement. You are an untouchable, unlovable insect because you won't go along, you won't sit down, shut up, and let us dispossess you again. Can you imagine why young men are angry? And look, it's not just young men. Young women are equally miserable, maybe if not more so, although they express it differently, and they're afforded different advantages and costs than we are. And when I say we, I just ran my analytics, it's I
think there's one percent at one point nine percent. We're trending up. But you know what I mean, of course, are equally trapped in this cycle of downward mobility and misery. And when we look at why politics is breaking down, well, this is a huge part of it. Every issue, whether it's Israel or anything else, has tinge of this in it. You can't get away from it, you can't escape it.
When I was going up to the Old Glory Club conference, I was writing from the airport with Dave Green, the distributist, and he's mentioned this live, so I'm not telling a tale out of school. But he was talking about going to the beach with his family, wife and children. All right, sorry about that, duties.
Of a landlord.
Anyway, I have completely and totally lost my train of thought. See, you know what boomers are annoying. This issue touches everything. Dave Green, That's where we were anyway, and he was describing the process of going to the beach with his family in an area that he grew up in area of a state renowned for its beaches. And at the time when he was there, it was families, right, that's
who went there. But in the time since the people who grew up there as baby boomers, have bought houses which have ballooned in value that they have become million dollars luxury investments. Right, what used to be is sort of towns where working class families would go for a weekend at the beach, maybe rent a place for not all too much money. And you know what, even with these inflated prices, he and his family went, and what did he find there? Old people scowling at him because
his son was being too loud. The families that had made this speech what it was are now inconvenient to the elderly folks retiring there. You see it everywhere. It drives you completely and totally crazy because you can't get away from it. Oh, you have an objection to well, the situation with Israel, Well boomer pops up and says, no, you're not allowed to. Similar to dating, similar to anything else, this generational traction, It runs through everything. You can't get
away from it. And the worst part is, well, things get worse when they're gone. Right, you have the institutional knowledge, you have the belief in the American system, which you or I might not share, but does at least keep the lights on does keep the wheels of this political machine running. When they're gone, that all stops. And that may be, as Kevin Deanna said the last time we spoke, the deepest cruelty of the boomer that will miss them when they're gone. And when I say boomers, of course
we understand, I don't mean all. You know, there are a great many of them that are good. It's a huge generation. But this issue is everywhere. You can't escape from it, even on vacation. And so that's why I thought this essay by John Carter so interesting, so worth your time. It's a good episode. I think you guys are going to enjoy it. But before we start, should mention if you want the episodes early in ed free, you can check them out on Patreon, Substack, or gum Road.
You can also head over to Axios Remote Fitness and Coaching and get some training. So, without further ado, here's John Carr. All right, John Cotter, welcome to the Jay Burdon Show. How you doing man?
Pretty good? It's good to be back. Thanks for having me on again.
You know it's a good episode, man. Where we are approximately eight seconds in and I've already managed to flub the name of a guest, and it is two of the most simple names in the English language. So you know what if this is, if this is how this is gonna go, it's gonna be an absolute disaster.
I completely missed that. What did you say?
I said, John kotta like you live in Massachusetts because apparently despite taller girl living, I can't manage to do it. But in all seriousness, man, you wrote a really great article. And look, you know what, I'm not going to have you read back through it. You know, we're not going to do it blow by blow. The article will be linked down in the description if you want to go through it. But uh, you've entered into the generational debate.
So let's just get into it with the inciting incident, right, Like, what prompted you to write this piece?
Well, I mean, you know, what was it Kevin O'Leary that that troud that I that I think he's Canadian
and then I apologize for that. So he had a tweet that enraged large numbers of people talking about how the younger generation, you know, they they were just very financially irresponsible, you know, spending twenty six dollars on lunch or something, and how if they took that money and they just invested it instead, you know, they would and put it into like an index fund, they would they would have enough for a down payment on a house,
you know, after ten years or something. And of course this this precipitated the usual generation slop debate, where like all the boomers and the spiritual boomer boomer con types were sort of taking a side, and you're like, oh, yeah, you know, these these millennials and zoomers, like they're just terrible with money, and they they're lazy, and they complain too much, and not all the younger people just just seething,
just be just just so furious. So my sort of take on it is that they do have kind of a limited point and that yeah, a lot of younger people are terrible with money. You know, I'm not great with it myself, frankly. Uh, But that this is very much a function of of the conditions that they were
raised in. So use the example of the marshmallow test, which I think was like done in like Stanford or something back in the nineteen seventies, where you know, for you for the small fraction of your listeners who don't know what the marshmallow test is that's when the experimenter puts a marshmallow in front of a kid and says, you can eat the marshmallow now if you want, but if you wait ten minutes, I'll come back and give
you a second marshmallow. And then they would track the kids after that look at their academic performance and their life outcomes, and they found that the kids who had the self controlled weights, who had low enough time preference that they could postpone immediate gratification for a larger future reward,
would tend to do better in life. And you know, that obviously makes sense, and there's gonna be confounding factors there, Like you know, obviously it's related to intelligence, the variability to conceptualize the future in the first place, and intelligence, of course is related to is related to, like, you know, good life outcomes in general. And then you know, some people in my comments they pointed out, yeah, if the kid doesn't like marshmallows, like you know, maybe they wouldn't
want to play, which is also a good point. You have to want the reward that's on offer. But what happens if the experimenter doesn't give the kid a second marshmallow, or like when they come back and they snatch away the first marshmallow and they put down two marshmallows each other one third the size of the original marshmallow. Right, And if you run that experiment a second time after that, you would probably find that not a single one of
the kids would wait. They would just cram that marshmallow right into their face. Because the thing with the marshmallow test is that you're not just testing the kid's ability to postpone gratification. You are also testing the trustworthiness of
the experimenter. And the point that I was making is that with all of the rug pulls that have been inflicted on Gen X and Millennials and zoomers over the last you know, thirty years, a lot of young people quite rationally conclude there's there's no point in saving because by the time, you know, for instance, I save up enough for a down payment on a house, the only twice as much to get like a down payment on
a house. You know, like that, there's you know, the future is just going to be worse than the present, so you might as well enjoy what you can in the presence. Thus the avocado toast.
Well, and this is a concept my buddy Sean Wiland, who's writing a book it should come out sooner or later, has been talking about for a while. I don't know if he originated it, but financial nihilism the idea that, well, the game is so rigged it doesn't even make sense to play out your hand, you know, why try it's
an unclimbable mountain. And I think it's important to make a distinction between a understand bowl and correct reaction, right, Like, obviously the correct answer is to be, you know, like the rat in the bucket of water, right, you know, swimming until the very end. Right, it's not a great shot, but yeah, it's right, It's better than nothing, and so look like it. It is grim, but it is understandable.
You can see it, like like, even though even though all the rats in that experiment died because the entire point, yes.
Yeah, maybe maybe we are as you know, Billy Corgan said, all just rats. And I don't know if the solog would have gone quite as well, but the message would
have been just as true. But the uh, I see it constantly and I feel the poll of it, right, I mean, look, part of the reason I'm a semi professional podcaster with a you know, less than total grasp of the English language is effectively you know, after throwing your elfit you know, multiple different careers and you know due to you know, no real fault of your bouncing off, right, you know, company gets shut down, you couldn't advance up
the ladder. It's like, well what do I got? And I see a lot of guys in that same situation.
I think I'm an exactly of that situation, right, Like I put like a decade of my life into cultivating an academic career and then, like, you know, just the very vulnerable point in that career, I got slammed by the DEI stuff, which is why I'm a professional racist on some stack now, you know, like.
It's a it's a growing club. And look, as much as I appreciate it, don't join this. And it's way better race to make money. And do I don't think that a circular economy of racist podcasters is the way to get out of this.
No, uh no, we're we're just like I don't know, the guys of mynest write in the Cedrilist papers or something, but I think that's maybe giving us too much credit.
Well, they were also all rich, you know, which is really the way to start it. There's an old joke about uh, you know, race like having a race car, where it's like, what what's the fastest way to become a millionaire driving a race car? And the answer is start with ten million dollars.
Uh.
There's something similar to being a political dissident, right, you know, which is it's it's apparently much more fun if you're if you're generationally wealthy. But yeah, one of the things that you brought up in this that I think is continually aggravating is the incredibly dismissive attitude that the stereotypical boomer has towards tho the words those who are younger than them, right, that oh, you are just too lazy or stupid to have made the decisions I have. And sure,
look there are many cases like that. I've this is a breach of multiple different laws. But you know, albred acted enough. I've told the story before of you know, meeting with a client who was explaining to me her situation with debt and she had taken out a twelve thousand dollars loan to buy a dog. So I no, that's true. Yeah, no, she got a dog loan. It didn't go well, as you can imagine. That is a h.
That guy I always forget his name with one of the show who like.
Advised kalb Hammer Yes yeaheah, yeah, like four years before he came her out. I was just actually doing that for a job, which, let me tell you, Uh, the boomers aren't all wrong. Don't get me wrong. There is a shocking amount of just uh, you know, a financial retardation. But I think a lot of people who look at it and say, well, no, I don't finance pure bread dogs. I live within my means, I save money, I went to school, got the degree I was supposed to, and
now what. And I think that's where a lot of the rage comes from that, like I did what you said and I ended up here. I listened to Dave Ramsey and yet here I am.
Right, Yeah, yeah, exactly. You study hard, you go to school, you pick a major which is you know, practical, you do all all the right things, and then you know, you get screwed anyhow, right, and that sort of I mean the other the other aspect isn't just kind of financial literacy. It's also the kind of general demoralization, right, like the quiet quitting phenomenon of just like, you know, why would I work harder then I'm being paid to work and I'm not being paid that well, so screw you.
Like it's like, you know, that's the general destruction of work ethic, right. He's this in academia amongst like, you know, the the undergraduate population who were quite happy to submit essays written by chat GPT because you know, it's all kind of a scam. Why I waste more time than
you have to studying? It's all bullshit, right, And so, I mean the first time that I had this kind of discussion with the marshmallow test actually was a couple of years ago with an older gentleman, uh sort of connected to my family, who was bemoaning the fact that
he couldn't find good help these days. I think he was running like a contracting business or something, and he's just sort of, you know, the work ethic of these kids is so terrible, and I so I explained exactly like this, this Marshmallow test dynamic to him, and he's just the look on his face like he'd never heard anything like this before, he'd never thought about it before. And then you know, a couple of years later, he
actually came up to me in an event. He lives on the other side of the country, so I don't see him very often, and he was like, you know, that really affected me. That really made me see it like a different way. I never thought about that before. And you're just you're just absolutely right, like, you know,
why would they work hard? Like I was like, yeah, So, you know, that was part of my motivation in writing that, because I think a lot of the boomers, like they're not actually bad people for the most part, they just uh don't understand things very well. And if they can be made to understand them, you know, maybe that can do a little bit of good. You know, at the end of the day, they're going to be around for a while and they vote, and they've got a ton
of money. And if we can harness that for our purposes by converting them ever so slightly to like away from evil, uh, you know, like that that could be very important. And we're gaining control of our countries and like these sort of like you know, wider political struggle.
Yeah, I mean a couple of things there, you know, the correlation or that I guess that the relationship to academy is easy to see, like I was in COVID, or I was in school during COVID, and my grades and my work ethic, to be honest, dropped off a cliff because it's sort of it was apocalyptic, right, It pulled back the curtain, made all things known, and you're like, wait a minute, this is a giant scam. I'm paying good school prices to go to the University of Arizona. Was getting a degree?
Mill Is the University of Arizona like making you pay like full ride.
No, No, the University of Arizona has a big online program. So I was saying, you know, this ostensibly august educational institution. They were giving me the same thing I could have done basically via a correspondence course. You know, they're kind of like lowest quality degree mill And once you've seen that, like if you have a certain personality, it's very very hard to care because you're like, oh, well, okay, this
this was kind of a shell game all along. And yeah, sure it probably would have been you know, ethically, and you know, perhaps you know, career wise better to have maintained that, you know, a average through college, but just psychologically it's really tough to do.
Motivated, to motivate yourself, Yeah, exactly. So the reason I asked that question was that the university that I was working at during COVID, so they sent all the students home as soon as the lockdown started in March, and then shortly after that they announced that, you know, they would refund residence fees, but they were going to charge exactly the same tuition fees. And I was just appalled. I was like, like, this is not like an online like zoom school is not the same as being in
a lecture theater. You know, like you don't have that in person interaction. It's it's just not comparable, and you're
charging the same for that. And then of course, like there's all the intangibles that like, you know, students aren't just paying for the coursework, right, Like you know, you're paying for the university experience, like you know, running around drunk at two o'clock in the morning with your friends and like doing pranks and you know, like all going to parties and stuff like joining clubs like all all of the universities, which they can't do because they're in
their bedrooms at home, in their pajamas, right, but they're still getting charged the same amount, And all of the sort of boomer professors were kind of like, wha, well, you know, which, there's much work for us to In fact, it's even more work for us to do this online. We're st long to figure this out, like of course we have to charge the same And I was like, I was like, but like they could just go to
con academy, man, like, which is free. And you're basically sending the message to them that there's no functional difference between like a good nominally good state school and like some fly by night online correspondence academy so which is like one tenth the price. So like, why wouldn't they
just do that? Like you're shooting yourselves in the foot, you know, absolute warrants and uh yeah, sure enough, like you know, enrollments dropping off a cliff since then, So typical short sighted boomers frankly, yeah.
And it's it's incredibly frustrating because you scale, you see that same behavior happen in kind of every segment. So obviously you have education, you have you know, the economy as well. Right when you are it has made very clear to you that your place of work has no loyalty to you whatsoever. Yeah, right, that they will, at the drop of a hat outsource your position, hire someone who looks a different way.
Right, And if you're that happen to your older siblings, you see that happen to your parents, you know, like like that's been going on, that that zero loyalty to employees, Like that's that's been the case since like the nineteen seventies.
Now, oh one hundred percent. Like one of the examples I think of is how incredibly competitive college admissions have become, right, where you have a wider and wider group of people competing for kind of a smaller and smaller kind of roadway to you know, the upper middle class. And what I've seen, you know, even when I was applying to schools ten years ago, right I'm old now, but was that it was sort of comedic, Right, how much better even you know, the white girls in class would do
than you. You know, you a small school like I went to, you kind of knew how smart everyone was. You know, sure there's some who were, you know, particularly good test takers, but you kind of know, right, and you're looking around and you're like, wait a minute, how did she how did he manage to get into that school that I got denied from. I know that I've got, you know, a better GPA. You start to get a
little bitter about it. I even think of guys who are younger than me, you know, who are who are in kind of my social group, you know, who are applying now were already have and man, it's it's grim. You know, You've got kids that are you know, academically gifted, captain of you know, sports teams, and they're you know, happy to get into kind of like third tier state schools which look like there's there's other elements to it. College is kind of fake.
You know.
There's a big article and I think Bloomberg that came out basically tracking your return on investment, which basically said, you know, anything out of the top fifty is functionally the same.
Yeah.
That's again a discussion for another day. But it is a huge status game. Yeah, and it's demoralizing when you think about, you know, your parents are kind of older people in your family who didn't apply themselves particularly much and got into that kind of upper echalot.
Yeah, they've all reasoned about how they would screw around when they were kids, and you know, all the mistakes they made and then they just kind of stumbled into a good life and you're like, oh, it's not nice, you know, and like and then meanwhile you look around and because of that intense competition, you've got like just insane levels of striverdom of like, you know, kids like trying to min max their college applications starting when they're
fourteen years old. You know, particularly with like Asian and South Asian students are pretty bad for that, although well like a lot of the white girls do this as well. And then you know, and that's like soul crushing all on its own, right, Like it's demoralizing seeing people that live like that. You're like is it worth it? Though? Like do I want to succeed if that's the price.
And then on top of that, of course, you have all the DEI from of action stuff where you consistently see people getting elevated to levels that you know that you know, like you're like, well, I would have been qualified to do that, more qualified because that person's an idiot how they get in because they were a black woman or you know whatever, And yeah, like all of that contributes to just like the general like destruction of motivation. And that's actually a really bad thing, right, Like, I'm
not making excuses for in action or laziness. It's actually incredibly poisonous because like that, when you get like that demoralized, you have a tendency to just kind of like sit back and be like, Okay, screw it, and then you don't do anything with yourself, right, it's uh, And then you know, and then you start developing bad, lazy habits as a result of that, and you come back like ten years later and like and you're kind of a
piece of shit actually, right. It turns into this sort of like self feel like prophecy where the system deprives you of opportunity and then as a result, you end up being the kind of person that shouldn't be given opportunity to.
Well. And funny enough, this is actually a point from famous Canadian Kermit the Frog impersonator Jordan B. Peterson. We're gonna mention rats a lot in this one. I didn't mean to, but you know what, I guess it's the theme of the episode. But he has the example of you know, rats playing and one of the things he said is that look like if you know in this this sort of play, this cooperative game. The rats fight,
it's like you know, puppies or whatever. And if the weaker rat isn't allowed to win at least a certain percentage, he gives up. The game ends. He just slops over and accepts it. And again, much like our earlier rat example, that is not, I guess you could say that the correct thing to do on sort of a mathematical level. But man is an animal, right, we have those same instincts.
And you hear a lot you know, of course you mentioned quiet quitting, but also you've heard, you know, a number of articles about the phenomenon of you know, young neats. They don't quite use the term, but men who've just checked out. You're seeing this already in education, where higher education's on track to be about sixty forty female male. You're seeing this in the corporate world, you know, and look understandably, there's another part of this which is just
blatant discrimination and hiring. The sort of a chilling example. One of my buddies is, you know, running out. He's you know, moving on to something else, and so he has kind of a long runway before that, and you know, he's kind of a dead man walking, and so people are talking to him quite frankly, and he recounted an experience with one of his higher ups who is basically at the same time, you know, bemoaning the low quality of the diversity hires and then wondering why quote, why
don't we ever see people like you? And you know, Jesus might listen to this, but he was sort of struck by that, right, like, you mean, you would.
Would be in a murderous rage of that right.
And to be fair, I don't think this woman was malicious. She was also complaining about hr but an older woman from a previous generation who clearly doesn't get it. Yeah, one d there is a problem with guys dropping.
I can't find like competent diversity God dammage. And then this is like, you know, at a societal level, this is going to shape up to potentially be one of the greatest tragedies has ever befallen our civilization, because like expertise needs to be passed on, people need to be
trained into it. They need to be given those education and it's a very delicate process of you know, mentors identifying the potential mentees who have the qualities required like they have the potential to actually learn the things that need to learn, and then going through all the extremely difficult work of educating them, which you know, for a lot of professions like that can take like ten years, right, And so you know, if you have someone who has
all the potential but they're not given that opportunity, God, I sound woke now, right like, because like this is exactly the kind of talking point that you'd hear from them all the time back when de I was getting rolled out in the first place.
Well, John Carter, I'll have you know you are a member of the woke, right even totally right?
Yeah, guilty, right, Like, but you know this was like you know, under the under the the assumption that you know, like the perfect human equality, right Like they always say like, oh well, they're just not given the opportunities. That's why they can't succeed. And they've now inflicted that, right So they they you know, yanked all that opportunity away from the young white guys, which has led to them being demoralized.
But you know, just as importantly, they haven't gotten that education that t training uh to do what they could have done otherwise. And in a lot of cases, it will just be too late for them by the time
this all sort of the fever burns itself out. And then meanwhile, all of the efforts of education was then kind of squandered on these people who couldn't benefit from it because they're they're idiots, or in the case of a lot of the girl boss types, they might not be stupid exactly, it's just like temperamentally, they don't have what it takes to be you know, a high level creatives or you know, like good doctors or scientists or
engineers or what have you. You know, they're probably well suited to to raising babies who will like smart babies who will then later become scientists, doctors and engineers, but like they're not suited to it themselves because they're women. And then we're going to have that sound of the situation where like all of the people in the profession don't have the talent necessary to actually carry out their
professional duties. All the people who could have been trained to do that weren't and are kind of rotting in the fields. And then what happens after that, right, because now you've got this like, you know, the people who would then have to do the training, like the new body of professionals are too retarded to have actually learned what they needed to learn, so they can't pass it on either.
Well, and here's the thing, I've remarked on this several times that almost everyone in my peer group is downwardly mobile. Yeah, with a few notable exceptions. And look, you know the old adage about you know, if you meet one bad driver, it's them, If you meet meet three, it's you.
Holt.
You know, if it were just simply me and all my peers were wildly successful, then you know what, I'm a loose all right. I feel like that's not true, because, to be honest, most people I know are not doing as well as their parents, and the guys who are are uniquely talented.
I don't know, I don't know anyone who is as doing as well as their parents, unless unless in the rare case where they really came from, like a particularly impoverished background. But yeah, anyone who's like middle class.
Like no, Yeah, I mean I can legitimately think of
two off the top of my head. And even if we lower the standard to simply having a professional job or having benefits, we're probably hit around forty to fifty percent, right, less than half, and you know, I'm nearly thirty at this point, right, the kind of point where you're supposed to be through that figuring it out stage, and yeah, it's it's incredibly radicalizing, especially when you kind of do the math, because you're like, okay, well, the argument that
all of these disadvantaged groups could be they are simply you know, aspiring astrophysicists, right that just given the opportunities, they could go to space camp and we'll have you know, a new golden age.
I'll be rocket scientists exactly.
Yeah, like you know, rocket surgeons and all that. And well, has it happened?
No, it hasn't.
If you've been in the corporate world, if you've been in education, it hasn't. And when you're thinking, well, you know, even within my own family, like setting aside the broader kind of like cultural or ethnic block, seemingly people a lot like me, you know, shared a lot of my you know, genetic makeup. Certainly my culture seem to have done fine. And if everyone in that you know, similar culture and genetic background is downwardly mobile, the individual explanation, well,
it doesn't seem to hold up. But it can't just be that everyone under the age of thirty is retarded.
I mean, you know, and this is why whenever you see like boomer con types handing out advice this this gets right to the heart of why that always elictits such rage, because everyone under a certain age understands full well that this is these are systemic issues, right, this is this is a matter of we'll go into the issues because we all kind of know what they are.
And then everyone over a certain age sort of refuses to see that in a large part because they were, you know, participants in creating that those systemic issues, and they individualize it. They're like, oh, well, you just need to work harder, right, it doesn't matter if you're talking about like you know, the economy or getting married and having kids or you know whatever it happens to be. Like they always kind of like focus it on this
like individual level. And it's like, yeah, you know, obviously, like you want to have you want to be a high agency person. You don't want to like sit there bemoaning like woe is me. But at the same time, like you need to be aware of these systemic conditions because like you know, those kinds of things cannot be solved at the individual level. They can only be solved at the political level.
And I think that look, a lot of that advice is is mel well meaning, and I get it, right. I understand that if someone you know asks you for trouble or asks you for help with their trouble landing a date, for instance, you'll offer that kind of boom er advice. You'd be like, I don't know, man, get in better shape, you know, maybe get a new barber, go.
Talk to girls more, right, And because it's directionally to the bar and buy a girl a drink, Yeah, Like, directionally that is correct, And particularly in some examples, I think we can all think of guys who actually do need that advice, you know, regardless of the culture that they'd be in.
If you're you know, BMI starts with a four and you know you kind of look a little bit like Asmin Gold, that probably wouldn't help you, you know. But at the same time, the frustration comes from the fact of, like, well, look like that's peanuts in comparison to these deep structural systemic issues, Like the problems that we've outlined are very very real, and when you've especially if you feel as if you've already run through to kind of pull yourself
up by your bootstrap's advice. You know, you've done the hard work, you've done the entry level career where you grind to try and press your boss, and when it doesn't come around, it's like, well look, man again. It's like when you're offered two slightly smaller marshmallows. It's like, well, look, at a certain point, I'm the idiot for continuing to play. You know, I'm Charlie Brown running up to the football for the twenty fifth time. I saw some.
I saw some I saw some tweets several months ago, because this is just like a perennial part of the
discourse right time is a flat circle. And it was like the guy was saying something like how every every like really intelligent guy he knows who has like, you know, like a physics degree and uh giant IQ or whatever, Like they've all dropped out and they're like beach bums working at like bars down and like the Caribbean or something, and like and it's like, yeah, actually, and I've met those guys, you know, and like, and the fact is
they're they're actually happier. You know, their their lives are completely aimless, but like they're way happier they were than they were in they were striving because like and it's like the fight club things need to let go, right, It's like they've just like abandoned any hope of like being upwardly mobile, of having that kind of upper mobile class life and professional respects and all of these kinds
of things. And they're just like, you know what, I'm just gonna it's gonna go hang out in the sun, serve people muyeties on the beach and like have sex with the waitresses.
And look you meet one of those. It's kind of a charming eccentricity. You know. Oh that's a funny path through life. But once you know half a dozen, it's like, well, this is a grave miss out location of human resources. Oh put it mildly.
I mean, this is this is this is the pathways was getting out before. This is how we end up losing indoor plumbing inside two generations, right, because like, if you're not cultivating your high quality human capital, like if you're not making sure that knowledge is getting passed to those people who can use it, then that knowledge will just get lost and it happens very quickly, like that could happen in one generation, and then once it's lost,
it's gone and can be rediscovered. But usually, you know, like rediscovering something is a lot more work than just passing it on. And uh, I feel like we're already seeing like signs of that that kind of systemic instability, like a lot of sort of just like little experiences I've had over the last year or so of like
things that should work but don't. And it's always like, you know, things like scheduling scheduling issues or like you know, database type stuff that like like the kinds of things that would be handled at the corporate head office, which you just know is packed full of diversity hires, and just like just retarded mistakes that just cause like immense amounts of chaos downstream because like someone forgot like didn't
do the logistics properly. And uh yeah, it was like that that I'd say in play em a couple of years ago. It's like the uh, what was it a competency crisis and the collapse of complex systems or something like that, which is prophetic.
So the the reaction to this has been extraordinarily poor. Look, you know, some of this is simply, you know, old men looking at young men's problems. That's a certain amount of that's perennial. But the reaction, particularly from right wing cultural institutions, you know, whether those are our churches, whether those are you know, political parties, whether those are just the kind of you know, think tanks and media organizations,
has been astonishingly poor. You, of course, remember what happened at Heritage not too long ago. What's happened at all of the different kind of Republican feeder organizations. There was an all out war.
Remind me what happened at Heritage.
Oh well, when the president of Heritage refused to ritually denounced Tucker Carlson because one of the usual suspects demanded it, they went on a full scale witch hunt, which included trying to force quite conservative, practicing Roman Catholics to eat Shabbat dinner, which is not permitted, and then when they didn't do that, that was used as a proof of
their deep and abiding ethnic hatred. Yeah. Of course, but we've seen these same purges directed primarily at young men on the idea justified because they are all quote unquote gropers.
Yeah, like the young Republicans like a year exactly.
Yeah. And here's a tweet, actually a tweet with a response from Meghan Basham, who is sort of a kind of like IDW adjacent of conservative watchdog, you know, big about you know, the kind of rooting out the woke stuff, but very much on the kind of worried about the woke right train. So if you can put yeah, yeah, well she she writes for the Daily Wire, So yeah,
you got the type total. So I'll read this one and then I'll read a response because I think this this perfectly describes the issue, right, So Meghan says, discussing why young white men are suddenly much more attracted to the wicked ideologies of Nazism and white supremacy no more legitimizes or exposes their sins, and discussing how the breakdown of the black family has led to higher rates of black crime legitimizes those sins. Why are we suddenly not
allowed to talk about how we got here? So fairly reasonable, you know. She takes a different view on several things in that than I have, but a legitimate question.
But she's not like Condemntory in the same in an unreflective way.
I agree with, yes, like she has a conservative view of many things which I don't agree with, but it seems to be, you know, in good faith. And then a secondary guy replies and all sort of surmise this because or summarized this rather because it's quite a long post.
But a character Will Spencer, who's again sort of an infamous character really going after you know, the Christian nationalist types, which I'm not a Christian nationalist, but a lot of my friends are, so I have no great affection for him. So basically he goes on to talking about how really what this is is all a giant op right, It's a giant plan to get at exactly how George Lincoln
Rockwell infiltrated the space. And he says that if you have objections to the way things are set up, it's because you are a secret member of the American Nazi Party. The only way you can have criticisms of the current system is either if you are an insane, woke leftist or the mirror image the so called woke right woke.
The surprise he didn't rise, he didn't connect that to the the SPLC. Now that we know that the SPOC was literally funding the American Nazi Party.
Well, John, I don't mean to break it to you. He's not particularly bright. He'll probably get there. We'll give him a couple of weeks of hard thinking and maybe he'll get there. But that's that's at least one level of abstraction. And I think that we're dealing with a with a you know, a real smooth brained individual. But suffice it to say that reaction that, oh, you have complaints when someone says like, yeah, guys are being driven
into a dark place by this. Now, I may disagree with her diagnosis on exactly what part of radical young men is the dark part, although I think we can all say there clearly is something there. You know, look at a lot of the a lot of what happens in the in cell community, a lot of what happens in the kind of like really you know, dark kind
of nihilist, violent extremist category. I realized that's a goofy term, but like, there are guys like that, and you can say, like, there's clearly a danger to pushing that, to pushing guys to that limit, to convincing them there's no point in playing the game. You're screwed. You can't get into politics, you can't get into academia, you can't enter the professional world.
They go somewhere, and the reaction from the nominal right wing, who is perhaps best set to answer these concerns, to answer these questions, they are, at least on their face, not ideologically opposed to the existence of young white men, as our counterparts on the left are, well, what are they met with? They're met with exactly the same thing. Oh, you're not doing well. It's because of you. You are inherently,
unredeemably broken. It's exactly the same thing that drove so many people away from the left half a generation before.
You're literally a Nazi, yes, yes.
Which to your point time is a flat circle because many people from for instance, the Daily Wire, like one Benjamin Shapiro, loved to make fun of people for saying that ten years ago.
Oh yeah, the Hitler on the Rainbow Slide means like, yeah, totally everyone I don't like his Hitler. I know there was like a Rod Dreer, I think it was Rodreyer, one of those typically sort of like wet John Wyn.
You have to be you have to be careful with me and Rodreer, I will say things that will lend to the deletion of my channel if we go on for about Rod Dreer for too long, So I will try to keep myself from interjecting.
I do not like him with that. Yeah, no, I'm not not a huge fan myself. So he had but he had this very typical kind of Dreer essay months ago where he went to DC and he was sort of mixing with all of the Republican staffers. Yeah.
I actually I wrote my first ever magazine article in response to this because it made me that bad.
Yeah yeah, yeah, no, it got under my skin too. But what kind of struck me is the they have very little like insight into like why this happens, right, Like they don't and they don't actually understand what is happening, which I think it's so the number of like un ironic like gnat socks that I've run into is very small, Like it's the number of people who will make painter jokes is almost one hundred percent inside of a thing, right,
so what you know what's going on there? Uh? And basically we've all grown up inside this oppressive system that uh you know, using the painter and his whole thing as like the excuse makes us the permanent villains of every narrative and then uses that to justify taking everything from us. And you know this and this kind of dynamic, you know, you know it goes back to like elementary school,
you know, if you're young enough. So like when you sort of click to that and understand what's going on there, you know there's obviously gonna you're going to feel a certain degree of injustice there. And by you know, making sort of jokes about you know, happy merchants or what have you. You you're essentially signaling. It's a form they
call it vice signaling. Sometimes you're especially signaling to the other guys around you that you do not hold these things sacred, which you know that your oppressors hold sacred. It's a it's a way of sort of saying, like saying to all the other guys, like, listen, it's okay to like talk frankly with me, because I get it too right. So it doesn't necessarily mean that you like you hate the Jews or whatever. It just means that you don't take anything about that discourse seriously at all.
It's not a concern for you, Right, you're not going to like get like you're not going to like you know, uh, You're not the kind of person who's going to have a nervous breakdown if some kind of emotional trigger word is used in your presence. And guys like Dreyer like they're still deep inside that they still have all those
triggers implanted in their mind. They still have a lot of motional conditioning layered and layered on them, which makes it so that you just you can't talk to them actually because like you know, like you know, if you say the wrong thing, they will denounce, right. And you know, to a large that there's a large amount of like generational separation there because like that's you know, amongst younger people, like it's generally just like liberal women who are like that.
But amongst the older generation, they're pretty much all like that. Whether they're conservative or liberal, it doesn't really make a difference actually, Like so yeah, I mean that's basically in my opinion, that's kind of what's going on there. They just like they don't understand that, Like they're like, oh, it's you worship Hitler. It's like no, no, I mean some small number of guys have kind of an unhealthy fascination.
But that's not really that common. It's more that we just you know, aren't holding him up as like, you know, this centerpiece of our fucking universe, right, and because of that, we can make jokes about him and about everything else. And that's I think actually like that actually scares them more than like, you know, being an unironic nat sock, because like, if you just don't take the things as sacred that they hold sacred, that's a dangerous thing.
Well, and you see this in the whole sort of dialogue around quote unquote media literacy, you know, the idea that there is exactly one way to interpret any film. You know, recently with the conclusion of The Boys, where you know, this character Homelander, who's kind of memes into being a right wing symbol, was uh, kind of garishly humiliated. It was really embarrassing for.
Them took his powers away and then tortured him to death or something. I ye, like two seasons of the Boys and then sort of lost interest.
Yeah, and look, I don't pretend you have watched it. I am enough of a zoomer that I don't really watch television. But point is the that that what came before that, Right, Why are a lot of young guys identifying with the villain now? Part of it is that sort of vice signaling, Right, Darth Vader has always been cool.
You know, there are a whole lot of bikers who have you know, mid century German symbology who don't seem to particularly know a whole lot about the painter himself, right as the symbol as a rebel.
Remembered like ten probably over ten years ago. Now, there's like this like map of this I forget, like what the game was. It was a Star Wars game, and you could play either as the Empire or as the rebellion and they and it was a map of the world according to like with countries like color coded according to like which side they played and like how likely they were to play that side. It was pretty funny because like the entire global South, we're all rebellion, and
then like the entire global North, we're all Empire. Yeah.
Well, and I think a big part of that, at least for guys like us, is that, like, to be honest, really the only way we are represented as the bad guys and any time where you are confidently existing as a man, you know, as a white guy, is displayed as villains, and I think that many people.
Unless there's one exception to that, at least in modern media, which is which is the sort of middle aged, older white guy who is using his influence and abilities to protect and to protect the younger diversity and sort of like, you know, hand over to them the world essentially, like you see that trope brought out every now and then.
Oh yeah, but what I'm but I think that, you know, the reason that you know so many of the right wing symbols or villains is that it's sort of accepting that role, like, yeah, I am the villain in your story. We are are mutually incompatible here, so you hoist the black flag and you can tell you're right one hundred percent that that makes them very uncomfortable. This whole discussion about media literacy is the idea that, oh, you're stupid
for behaving that way. It's like, oh, well, what happened to death of the author?
Guys?
You know, I thought we could reinterpret things and.
We ever, I don't. I don't know if you ever talked about Starship Troopers that's come up on.
Oh we should.
Actually this is because I last year I played my part in reviving the perennial Starship Troopers discourse, and I and I and I wrote like a pretty long essay about this, which I think, you know, you and your readers might enjoy it because, like I opened the first the essay, the first like few pages of it are my take on what a good opening to a starsh Troopers movie. That was like that was actually trying to do like the original book, well, like how that would look.
You know, it's kind of like like scene by scene, but like the sort of you know, philosophical point I was trying to make. There was that like the media literacy people. First of all, like you know, there's the fact that Verhoven was not practicing media literacy himself, because you know, obviously he tried to invert the meaning of the original of Heinleine's original work. But then if you consider each layer of media, you know, there's the book
that has like a certain pretty obvious meaning. I mean, it's quite didactic. It's hard to misinterpret the Starship Troopers.
And then there's the movie which sort of flips that meaning, tries to flip that meaning on its head, but it's so hamd fisted about it, and actually just you know, but then after the movie came out, you have the mean layer that gets gets put on top of that as a new layer of media, and that actually has to be interpreted sort of on its own as something somewhat independent from the movie itself, because there's meaning there that's like not in the movie, and then that was
used to like reinvert the movie back to like its original the original meaning of the book.
Well, I will have to have you back on because I'm actually and this is horrible podcasting because I have no idea when this episode will come out. But in the next day or two I'm actually going to be recording an episode on the Moon is a Harsh Mistress. And I've been sort of thinking, oh, it would be a ton of fun to do Hindlin's three works of speculative political fiction and sort of an unofficial series right to hit all of them. And I've already honest.
What are you considering for your third work, Stranger and a Strange Land.
Yeah, Stranger in a Strange Land just is sort of to round it out, But what might be fun, Josh, I've.
Already the civic fascism, the anarcho libertarianism, and the hippie liberalism basically.
Well and two things.
One.
I've read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress before and enjoyed it, but it's been years, so going back through it. One, the libertarians are never beating the allegations because there is a fifteen minute digression in that book about how the age of consent is stupid.
Dude, that's not even like you think that's bad. I don't know if you how much Highline have you read.
I've read that and Starship Troopers.
Okay, so you've read, like those are kind of somewhat earlier works. So if you read his works from the nineteen seventies, where by that point he become sort of a literary star, and the science fiction firmament and editors were scared of him, so his books started to have, you know, very self indulgent, so that he got I think worse than Anne Rands for like, like I remember, I think it was like Friday, which is nominally a book about this genetically engineered super assassin or something, but
somewhere in there there's like this conversation about sex between the genetically engineered superassassin and like I don't know, some some guy that goes on for like one hundred pages, like it's it's just it's interminable. Like it's basically it's like hindline, like laying all of his fetishes there, you know, like it's just like come on, man, and he did a lot in his later books. I mean, he's another one. Basically the entire thing is like a work of fetish fiction.
It's I Shall Fear No Evil, which is about a billionaire having like an eight like an aged billionaire like on his deathbed who has his brain transplanted into the body of his hot secretary.
And it's just lovely.
And then like you know her, like her her ghost or whatever like remains inside the body and starts like talking to him. So she's like inside him, and it's yeah, it's a and he's he's fully enjoying being a young woman. I'll just put it that way.
Less you doubt that that some people just should not have been allowed to escape middle school without being shoved in a locker and give it wedgies. Uh, this is what happens when you let people do whatever they want. I say, like I actually enjoy hindlines like kind of speculative political faction. It's interesting and not looking to spoil the discussion on spoil the discussion on the Moon is a harsh Mistress. I'm I'm almost done with it, but it is.
It is.
I will say this, It is interesting the constraints required to make a narco libertarianism feasible, and I will leave that there.
Yeah, yeah, totally. I mean also, Moon is a harsh mistress? Is the original polycool?
Yes, yeah, no, it It gets a little freaky. And one of the other parts where you sort of roll your eyes is damn, I'm supposed to be doing this another day, but you're just gonna go for it.
Is.
There's this very heavy handed moment where our main character explains to these sort of backward country yokels his polycool situation, and then he's he's thrown in jail for bigamy, and you know, of course he's morally outraged, and apparently both the Moon and Earth unite in condemning the backwards rednecks of Kentucky who said, hey man, it's kind of weird to have like an eight person pollicule where one of your wives is fifteen, And yeah, it's again, man, every
stereotype about libertarians is completely and totally true. It's all based in fact. Well, John, this has been a ton of fun. Man, I enjoyed this. I've said this a couple times, but you are one of an elite few people on substack where I read your articles religiously. They're quite good. Although I will say I was a little behind on this one, so I didn't catch it when it first came out, but one of my good friends sent it to me, so at least in my social circle.
You're sort of a literary celebrity. But where can people find you, man?
I mean substack, barsoom dot substack dot com, postcards from barsoom and uh that's you know when I when I publish for every week or two, I try to get something out, and you can find me pretty much every day, uh, coal posting on x You know I've I've been on on there all day doing the the migrant rape gangs reports, participating in that.
Yeah, I've got I'm gonna have to do an episode about it, but I'm not even trying to.
I think on this one, I just can't read it as I've been reading it all day and it's it's like an info hazard, man, Like it leaves scars on your soul reading some of that stuff.
I mean, my my reaction uh at probably much to the distress of my legal counsel, is uh. There are traditional British solutions for problems like these. William Wallace didn't do anything this bad and look what they did to him, exactly before I further incriminate myself, John, this was a ton of fun and everyone at know keep your head up like it last forever.
Thanks for having me on